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This is the first in a series of essays on the important pieces of Korean cinema freely available on <\/em>the Korean Film Archive\u2019s Youtube channel<\/em><\/a>. You can watch it <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
By day, Miss Lee and Mr. Pak work at the same bank in downtown Seoul, maintaining an ostensibly cordial if chilly professional relationship. But at night, they both return to the same apartment in a riverside tower block, where they live almost \u2014 but not quite \u2014 as husband and wife. \u201cWeddings are lame,\u201d insists Mr. Pak when Miss Lee, spurred by the coming nuptials of another formerly secret office couple, asks if they\u2019ll ever have one of their own. He then nods off, putting an end to one of their rare opportunities to communicate, hemmed in as they are by the need for propriety at work and the insistence of his superiors at the bank on round after round of nightly drinking.<\/p>\n
Having reached her late twenties without any marriage prospects, at least as far as the rest of her colleagues know, Miss Lee, given name Hyeon-joo, plays the role of the office \u201cold miss\u201d (\uc62c\ub4dc\ubbf8\uc2a4), a title she\u2019d until recently shared with the worker who sits next to her, the one about to get married. The boss, apparently out of pity, gives Hyeon-joo some time off and a holiday bonus as well, which Mr. Pak, in his work persona, jokingly suggests she use to tag along on the newlyweds\u2019 honeymoon. Humiliated, she must wait until the evening at home before she can scream, shout, and throw household objects as well as punches in retaliation at her husband-to-be-or-not-to-be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n